Finding Gold

James Butler Hickok was shot in Saloon No. 10 in 1876, a time when Dead-wood, South Dakota, was on the fringe of the frontier, a place where ending up face-down dead on your poker hand was not an altogether surprising end to an evening.

On a Friday night in mid-February, my buddy Peter Peil and I stepped into Saloon No. 10 and found that although Dead-wood's historic Main Street has retained the look and feel of the Old West, the Calamity Janes and Charlie Utters who hung with Hickok have been replaced by cliques of Patagonia-clad 20-somethings drinking Jell-O shots, cowboy-booted 30-somethings escaping nearby Rapid City, and the kids on a girls' weekend out and a hair cover band in ripped jeans butchering "Sweet Child of Mine."

In fact, thanks to a 1989 law legalizing limited-wage gambling in Deadwood, the town's rich history has been trumped by the neon-lit jangling of slot machines tended by blue hairs and Rapid City suburbanites. We made the best of it by stuffing ourselves on a crab leg buffet, trying to find a run of luck at the blackjack tables and parking ourselves on bar stools with front-row views of Saloon No. 10's meat-market shenanigans.

With the myriad of historical sites closed for the day, we escaped the neon streets of Deadwood to a two-room rental cabin nestled in the hills and drank Fat Tire Ale, stoked the woodstove and talked about what drew us to the land of Wild Bill's famous "Dead Man's Hand" in the first place: the opportunity to explore the expanse of good riding country in the Black Hills.

The Black Hills are a broad-shouldered deposit of sediment known as the Pierre Formation, which rises above the oat fields and abandoned grain harvesters of southwestern South Dakota and northeastern Wyoming. This giant dome of rock and till is creased with deep valleys and dimpled with peaks as high as 7200 feet. The pine-needle-blanketed lump of granite and limestone has borne the weight of a wide variety of creatures, ranging from the Tyran-nosaurus rex to General Custer and Crazy Horse to Kevin Costner. The remains of the first three are being dug up by paleontologists and anthropologists, while the latter is the only one who left more than a skeleton--he owns Jake's, a restaurant in Deadwood decorated with Costner-abilia, including costumes from Dances With Wolves.

The Black Hills are also home to Sturgis (the motorcycle rally, in case you have been living in a cave), Mount Rushmore, the Crazy Horse Monument and the 1.2-million-acre Black Hills National Forest.

The forest is covered with a vast network of fire roads, trails and goat paths, much of it open to ORV use. That said, there are no ORV-specific trail maps available, and the state offices are not actively promoting off-road riding here. I stopped in at the ranger station in Rapid City, a sprawling South Dakota plains town of nearly 60,000 located on the eastern edge of the Black Hills. When I asked about ORV riding opportunities, the response was less than enthusiastic.

"Well, I think you can ride some of the unmarked trails," a dour tourism office employee said. "But I'm really not sure."

He sold me a Black Hills National Forest map, which is the best map currently available for off-roaders. Numbered trails and roads are shown, and the bulk of the trails in the national forest carry some kind of marking. A call to the national forest headquarters yielded more detailed information on the area's off-road riding status. In South Dakota, the ORV regulations are fairly relaxed. Any road that is two-track, meaning it has a strip of grass in the middle, is open to ORV use. No permits are required for ORVs.

Across the border in the Wyoming portion of the Black Hills, you have to get a Wyoming state ORV sticker, and ORV use is even less restricted. The Wyoming Black Hills National Forest ORV map lists which areas are open to use. On most publicly owned lands, all roads are open for ORV use, and off-trail riding is prohibited.

We confined ourselves to South Dakota and found plenty of trails available. In fact, there may be two to three weeks' worth of unique riding in the area. The Black Hills National Forest map is completely overwhelming, as the area is roughly 30 miles across and 80 miles from north to south. This 240-square-mile region is covered with a spider's web of paved, gravel and two-track forest roads. Trails run among all of these. In fact, the biggest problem we had was figuring out where to begin riding.

We had some luck searching for the larger areas located between the paved roads and blessed with lots of ORV-legal trails. What we found, however, was that some of those offered great riding, while others were open, flat areas that weren't as exciting to ride. The key is the geography, which varies in the hills. Parts have steep valleys and heavy pine cover. The riding there was quite challenging, and we found several hillclimbs that were near the limits of our machines and skills.

Thankfully, we obtained some good tips on where to ride from Ross Brown, the information officer for the Off-Road Riders Association, an ORV club formed in the early 1990s to help keep the region's riding areas open. After Brown generously directed us to an area to ride, we drove down High-way 308, going west from Hill City and just past Tigerville. Finding trailheads is almost impossible, so we located an open area, unloaded and headed into the brush. It took us a while to discover a turn-in to the trail system. I'd suggest finding a numbered trail that comes out on the main road before parking.

The trail system we uncovered was vast and surprisingly well-marked. Trails are numbered, and most of the intersections indicate some of the numbers of the trails. The area is not nearly as easy to navigate as an established network such as the Hatfield-McCoy Trail System in West Virginia, but it's not hard to keep track of where you are if you follow the map carefully.

We rode twisting two-track through pine forests and up some steep climbs, staying in the area east of Deerfield Lake. The lake is aptly named, as we spotted dozens of whitetail and mule deer bouncing through the brush ahead of our machines. On a long day's ride, we saw only one other quad on the trail, and we never took the same trail twice. This small portion of the Black Hills could provide a couple of days of riding!

One of the highlights of our day was a stop recommended by Brown, a little bar in Rochford called Moonshine Gulch. The place has great burgers, friendly owners and a colorful atmosphere. We had lunch there twice.

On day two, we ventured farther south and rode near Bear Mountain Lookout, not far from the Crazy Horse Monument. This area has extensive snowmobile trails, which slowed us a bit. Snow-mobiles take precedence in the Hills, so winter ATV riders should be careful to avoid those and stay on the trails not designated for sleds.

Incidentally, the weather in the Black Hills permits ORV riding almost year-round. Our February ride saw unseasonably warm temperatures that ran as high as 50 degrees Fahrenheit/10 degrees Celsius. The snow levels were low at that time, and we were able to run virgin trails with medium-lugged tires without any trouble.

In fact, we found several networks of trails that hadn't been touched in several months, so we were breaking through virgin powder. On one of those routes, Peil and I spotted a trail running to the top of a 5000-foot bald peak across the valley. We took it to the base of the mountain and wound our way through a stand of pine and up a steep, rocky incline to the top. The view was unfettered and primal, with nothing but pine forests and craggy mounds of granite stretching as far as the eye could see. The land appears much as it did when Wild Bill rode here in the late 1800s, when the wilderness was truly wild.

That view was not a marked overlook on a map, nor did the trail we took to the top appear as more than a ribbon of dotted lines buried in 1.2 million acres of open country. Standing atop that nameless mountain, I understood why Brown and his club are fighting to keep this area open yet are not terribly eager to create the next Hatfield-McCoy or Paiute Trail System. Those well-marked, easily accessible places are fantastic moneymakers for the region, offer great riding and make it easy for just about anyone to enjoy the sport. As for me, I'm happy to stand atop an unknown mountain at the end of an unmarked trail, drink the pine-scented air of the Black Hills and take in a small slice of Wild Bill Hickok's world.